I had not been to Israel since June 2023, and during this recent visit I found a different country from the one I had known. Although I have worked abroad for many years, Israel is where I was born and raised. It is the place where my parents lived and are buried; it is where my son has established his own family and most of my oldest and best friends live. Knowing the country from the inside and having followed events even more closely than usual since 7 October, I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered on my return, but it was still profoundly disturbing.
This bit hit hard for me.
Thousands of children were killed? It’s the enemy’s fault. Our own children were killed? That is certainly the enemy’s fault. If Hamas carry out a massacre in a kibbutz, they are Nazis. If we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee shelters and kill hundreds of civilians, it’s Hamas’s fault for hiding close to these shelters. After what they did to us, we have no choice but to root them out. After what we did to them, we can only imagine what they would do to us if we don’t destroy them. We simply have no choice.
EDIT:
Another poignant line.
…nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood.
The guardian has to go off message every so often to maintain a veneer of credibility for its liberal base.
Liberal Zionism isn’t really off base
They’re pretending to criticise Israel at least though. This is unusual.
The tides have already turned because of social media and public protests.
Same newspapers slandering MLK during his activism are portraying MLK as a hero now. Same newspapers pushing lies about the Iraq war are publishing the “correction pieces” after the damage is done.
Gaza is in rubble and the damage is done so it is time for the propaganda papers to find out how this could have happened. Unless Israel starts World War 3 in which case they will promptly start blasting their front page with Iranian women being oppressed and America needing to liberate them.
Literally the first thing I saw after this comment was an article about the lack of Women’s Rights in Iran. You’re good.
Don’t get me wrong there’s definitely some issues in Iran. But it’s pretty obvious to anyone with a functioning brain the Israeli mass rape torture prisons are far far worse.
Newspapers will always focus and magnify issues of an adversary America “needs to liberate”. They use the manufactured consent and dehumanization of the target country to bomb the entire country to rubble. Destroy all the infrastructure. Thousands or millions starve to death.
Another tried and true classic is lying about mass rape like our media recently did for Israel. That has actually happened quite a few times in the past when consent needed to be manufactured to invade a country and murder a population.
‘2011 Libyan rape allegations’
‘Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno Ocampo said "we have information that there was a policy to rape in Libya those who were against the government.’
And afterwards:
‘Investigations by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch[1] and Doctors Without Borders[2] did not find evidence that mass rapes had occurred.’
I mean it’s like landing a bullseye on a wall filled with targets. It could be because you were aiming at the right one, it could just be the target-rich environment.
